-- RodrigoFuentes - 04 Sep 2008

Thank you, Rodrigo. Please note also that "[t]he jury also convicted Whorley ... of sending and receiving 20 obscene E-mails which graphically described, among other things, parents sexually molesting their own children." Someone has been sent to jail for sending and receiving text describing imagined events.

I still think, after all the wonderful work that has followed it, that The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's most perfect novel (which, as it happens, my father edited). And on the theory of this prosecution, she could have been sent to jail for writing it.

-- EbenMoglen - 05 Sep 2008

Last month, the UK passed the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which, among other things, makes it a criminal violation to possess extreme photographic images. These images don't have to involve children at all; they merely have to depict an image produced solely for the purpose of sexual arousal that someone believes "is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character," and falls within section 7 (below).

(7) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following— (a) an act which threatens a person’s life, (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals, (c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or (d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive), and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real.

-- JoshS - 05 Sep 2008

Supporters of the criminalization of child pornography and violent pornography often argue that images and stories depicting such activities, even when entirely fictional, can induce predisposed individuals to molest children or commit violent sexual crimes. Like the argument that violent movies and violent video games can promote anti-social behavior, the catalyst theory of child pornography has some intuitive appeal.

However, the empirical research examining the link between pornography and abuse is not exactly conclusive. Even assuming some positive correlation exists between the possession of simulated violent pornography and actual sexual violence, what laws like the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act set out to do is incarcerate people for undesirable activities they have not yet undertaken, but could undertake in the future. Such laws can't be justified on any retributive theory of punishment. The future harm they seek to prevent, while potentially horrendous, will always be speculative. There's nothing speculative about the havoc incarceration wrecks on the lives of individuals who possess simulated violent pornography, or on the lives of their families.

Convictions on the basis of future crimes have no place in a justice system that pays more than lip service to the notions of free will and personal responsibility.

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 06 Sep 2008